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Comment by anarchodev | Hacker News Reader

Consider that nobody breaks into your home/vehicles because it's fun. They do it out of desperation. I'm not alleging any ignorance on your part, it's just not the sort of thing we think about often.

The penalties for these crimes are already extremely severe.

So I fall on the side of, I'd rather change the system proximally to help those who resort to this sort of petty crime for cash so they don't need it, rather than making it easier for cops to put these people back into a system which enslaves and disenfranchises them for generations (leading to more crime), and in so doing gives them an excuse to monitor literally anyone else in your neighborhood without a warrant for any reason.

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The fact that some people commit crimes out of desperation isn’t a very good argument for removing disincentives to commit crimes. You don’t lock your door at night because you think someone might break in for fun and you want to deprive them of that fun. You lock your door to protect your family and your belongings.

The question of moral culpability might be relevant when discussing legal punishments, rehabilitation, social welfare, etc. but it really isn’t relevant to what basic measures one can take to protect their home. To use an extreme example, someone could be forced under duress to break into your home. They clearly wouldn’t be morally culpable, but that simply isn’t relevant. You still lock your doors.

Sure, I'm not telling anyone not to lock their car doors. You don't have to make it as easy as possible for someone to steal your belongings in order to understand that some measures will do more harm than good. There are solutions which aren't part of either extreme.

A friend of mine had his car broken into something like 4 or 5 times in 6 months in an underground gated parking area at his apartment. Each time they would break the side window to get inside the car. They would do this with half a dozen cars at a time.

It wasn't a particularly bad part of town, but the entrance to the parking area wasn't in a high traffic area and there was some green space nearby making it pretty easy for people to sneak into the parking area.

He eventually just stopped leaving anything at all in his car, rolling down the windows, and leaving it unlocked. As soon as he did that, the thieves would simply move onto the next vehicle without damaging his. Once most people started leaving their windows rolled down, the thieves stopped visiting to move onto more rewarding victims...

So sometimes the solution is to not lock your car doors. :(

Actual evidence consistently shows that mild penalties with a high probability of enforcement are most effective at maximizing compliance. If you're going to turn up the dial on the enforcement probability, you absolutely should turn down the dial on the punishment, else you encourage a situation with perverse incentives and an undue burden on society greater than the one you are trying to solve.

>Actual evidence consistently shows that mild penalties with a high probability of enforcement are most effective at maximizing compliance.

I find it hard to believe that mild penalties are more effective deterent than high penalties and high enforcement.

That said, the punishment should still fit the crime

High penalties can incentivize to commit further crimes, at least. An extreme example might be capital punishment for robbery, which I'd expect (but haven't seen statistics, or don't remember) would increase the rate of murder committed during robberies.

Yes! A good example is three-strikes laws, where a misdemeanor can get you a life sentence, so some criminals are highly incentivized to aggressively fight an additional arrest, with very little marginal incentive not to commit murder to do so.

From a 2015 study[1]: "Three-strikes laws were associated with a 33% increase in the risk of fatal assaults on LEOs."

[1]https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/22/4/274

Maybe because high penalties + high enforcement == rebellion?

A traffic-related anecdote: the geograplically-isolated suburb I live in had a metric fuckton of speed traps about twenty years ago - like, an absurd quantity. You had cops staking out basically everywhere and giving massive tickets for the slightest infractions. Did this actually make people stop speeding? No way. It got enough people pissed enough that the entire municipal government was voted out on a program of ending the absurd overenforcement of traffic laws.

Now, it also didn't help that there was a widespread perception that the city government was using this to line its coffers, but I think the major takeaway is that citizens will only put up with so much if infractions that nobody really sees as serious are consistently, harshly punished. Eventually, you're going to get a backlash.

Of course, this calculus would probably be different if what was being punished wasn't crimes largely committed by a politically active upper middle class, but I think the example is instructive for many cases.

I guess prohibition also kinda falls into this category, so I should refine my original statement to "in cases of high enforcement/high penalties where most people don't see the big deal, those regimes will not last long via an accelerative mechanism."

I get what you are saying about tipping points, but in your example, but i would fault a bad law, not the enforcement. If the speed limits are universally hated, the community should raise them. Instead they chose to ignore and arbitrarily enforce them, most likely against minorities and the poor. Why keep undesireable laws on the book? The public should want the law enforced.

While I agree with your points, I'd also point you to the bait Amazon package experiment by Mark Rober (find it on YT) that pretty much caught people that by any objective standards were just a-holes who did it just because it was an easy crime to get away with, and got some sort of thrill out of it.

But yeah, I'm totally for addressing the underlying societal causes of crime (the reasons otherwise decent people are driven by desperation to commit them), rather than just addressing the "symptoms"... enforcement and punishment is reactive and IMO does little to actually deter further/future crime.

The people caught on video stealing the glitter bomb were in on the "experiment" - what was shown in the video was mostly or entirely staged. (find the apology from Mark Rober on YT :)

That's not my memory of the situation, and a quick Google confirms: only a few of the thefts were fake, and Mark Rober didn't know they were fake. The intention was for all the thefts to be legit, it's just that he paid some friends to help him get the package stolen (by putting it in front of their houses), and those friends apparently cheated him.

Unfortunately after those one or two fake sections were caught everyone assumed everything was fake, and the internet took up that gossip like wild fire, tainting the whole video. Bit of a shame, and apparently that lie persists.

Huh... hadn't hear of that... from what I understand after a quick search: 2 of the reactions/shots were not genuine thefts, but this was not exactly intentionally faked by Mark Rober, but by the people who he enlisted to help bait the porch pirates. Mark offered a reward if the people he enlisted as porch baiters were able to return the stolen boxes, and they took it upon themselves to make sure the "thieves" would "return" the packages somehow.

Teenagers for sure break into cars and houses because it’s fun.

In the 1990s, it was a regular pastime of my friend group.

You make a good point, and I elided any discussion of the prison system (in the U.S., at least) to make my comment brief. I agree with you that we should be working on the root causes of crime too, and personally I'd rather see a more reformation based prison system in the U.S. than our current punishment/deterrent based system.

Thing is, I'm not sure they all do it out of desperation. One incidence in the neighborhood was most certainly an addict, for which I agree with your point in helping them. But a more salient example is a group of professional thieves that stole a local plumber's truck and tools.

If you're down on your luck and for whatever reason have to resort to looting houses and cars, I can see your point. But if someone has made it their _job_ to steal my neighbor's livelihood? My sympathy runs out.

For sure, I understand where you're coming from. There are certainly instances of this type of crime that aren't defensible under any pretext rooted in economic oppression. I don't have all the answers, just my perspective.

Consider that once you invite the cops into your neighborhood though, they operate on their own biases, regardless of whether or not they think it's worth it to track down whoever stole the stereo out of your sedan. Car prowl is only the pretense for them to show up, and once they do their presence will be detrimental for the "addict" population. So you're maybe not punishing who you think you are.

That's a rather strong case for taking the law into our own hands, rather than essentially subcontracting it out to someone who you effectively don't have management power over. Putting trust in myself and my neighbors rather than police seems to be a better solution especially if the police aren't really residents of the specific neighborhood.

Whatever man, someone stole my car from my garage a few weeks ago. It was recovered a block away, parallel parked in front of someone's garage. They trashed the inside, and didn't steal anything of value.

Tell me, how were they desperate?

They left sunglasses and other valuables in the car, but trashed the inside. They left camping gear in my garage, but stole a sentimental machete and some other random odds and ends that weren't monetarily valuable at all.

If they stole all my camping gear, I wouldn't be as mad as them defacing my property.

It wasn't about petty cash. It was about shitting all over someone else's property. Literally, a friend had their car broken into, and they took a big dump on their hood. Didn't even steal anything.

Fuck people.

Was the Creedence all right?

> The penalties for these crimes are already extremely severe.

Exactly, so why not help people make better choices by letting them know that they're much more likely to be caught?

Also, to put things in perspective, grand theft-type crimes were historically (and currently, in some fundamentalist regimes) punished by hanging, amputation of ears or hands, or flogging. The punishments today are tender loving care by comparison.

I have actually never considered that the only reason someone might break into a house or vehicle is desperation.

Have you considered that when penalties seem extremely severe, it's possibly because the percentage of perpetrators that are caught and punished is very low?

Crime can make more money than being a landscaper or bricklayer. Why sweat in the heat all day when you can break into one house a week?

The penalty is harsh but chances to get caught are somewhat low.

If someone robbed your home and you recognized them, would you report them to the police?

Absolutely not. I don't want police anywhere near my community.

EDIT: Yeah I don't call the cops. Go ahead and downvote I guess, or feel free to try another hypothetical you came up with in your head for this discussion.

What if someone shoots you in the leg and robs your house?

I didn’t downvote you.

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